Curated playlist

Gangsters from New York City

James Burke (gangster)James Burke, nicknamed Jimmy the Gent, spent his criminal life beside the Lucchese crime family without ever being allowed to join it. He was born on the 5th of July 1931. He is believed to have organized the 1978 Lufthansa heist. His…
Bugsy SiegelBenjamin Siegel, the American mobster the world remembers as Bugsy, despised that name. It came from slang for crazy, and he told people to call him Ben or Mr. Siegel. During his murder trial in 1941, some reporters wrote that his eyes…
Meyer LanskyShortly after The Godfather Part II reached theaters in 1974, Meyer Lansky picked up the telephone and called the actor Lee Strasberg. Strasberg had played Hyman Roth, a gangster based on Lansky, and had earned an Oscar nomination for it.…
Henry HillIn 1955, an eleven-year-old boy named Henry Hill crossed the street from his Brooklyn home and wandered into a dispatch cabstand, hoping for a part-time job after school. The men who gathered there were local mobsters, and Hill had admired…
Al CaponeAl Capone always turned the left side of his face away from the camera. Three knife slashes had scarred that cheek, and he told people they were war wounds. The nickname they earned him, Scarface, was one he loathed. His closest friends…
Lucky LucianoLucky Luciano, born Salvatore Lucania, was arrested 25 times between 1916 and 1936 and spent no time in prison. The charges ranged from assault and illegal gambling to blackmail and robbery. Then a trial over a prostitution racket ended…
Frank LucasFrank Lucas liked to ask one question when he explained how he moved heroin. "Who the hell is gonna look in a dead soldier's coffin?" He put it that way in an interview for a New York magazine article published in 2000. Lucas operated in…
Frank CostelloFrank Costello, an Italian-American crime boss, tried to keep his face off television during the Senate's organized crime hearings. The attempt backfired. Cameras settled on his hands instead, and his fidgeting and evasive answers played…
Paul CastellanoPaul Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family of New York City, was shot dead outside Sparks Steak House in Manhattan at around 5:26 pm on Monday, the 16th of December 1985. He had run the family since 1976. By any measure, he was one…
Joe GalloJoe Gallo was shot dead at Umbertos Clam House in New York's Little Italy. It happened at around 4:30 in the morning on the 7th of April 1972, his 43rd birthday. Gallo, nicknamed "Crazy Joe", was a captain in the Colombo crime family of…
Albert AnastasiaAlbert Anastasia was born Umberto Anastasio in Calabria, Italy, and died in a barber's chair in Manhattan on the 25th of October 1957. Along the way he collected the nicknames The Earthquake and The One-Man Army. Few figures in American…
John GottiJohn Gotti ran the Gambino crime family of New York City, and one of his fellow mobsters once delivered a harsh verdict on him. Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, the former underboss of the Lucchese crime family, said: "what John Gotti did was the…
Sammy GravanoSammy Gravano, known to the world as Sammy the Bull, once faced up to 20 years in prison and received a sentence that amounted to less than one year. In 1994 a federal judge gave him five years, but he had already served four. The judge…
Roy DeMeoRoy DeMeo, a Brooklyn mobster in the Gambino crime family, was found dead on the 20th of January 1983. His body lay in the trunk of his own Cadillac Coupe DeVille, parked in the lot of the Varuna Boat Club in Sheepshead Bay. The corpse was…